The Fight For Justice Continues Five Years After Trayvon Martin’s Death

Since Trayvon’s death in 2012, the number of young Black men who have been victims of homicide has gone up and down in Central Florida.

Sunday marks the fifth anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s death. Five years after the unarmed teen was fatally shot in Sanford, data shows that life for young African-American men in Central Florida has gotten better in some aspects but have worsened in others, reports the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

Government data indicates that in Central Florida, life has improved for young black men in some ways but gotten worse in others since Martin was killed.

Their unemployment rate in Orange County is down 38 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and the rate at which they graduate from high school is up sharply in Orange, Seminole, Osceola, Lake, Volusia and Brevard counties, as it is for all students, according to the Florida Department of Education. The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity had no unemployment numbers for black men ages 15 to 25 in Seminole County in those years.

The number of black males ages 15 to 25 who are the victims of homicide in Central Florida has seesawed since 2012, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. That year, Martin was one of 31. In 2015, the most recent year for which data is available, the number was 35.

Rev. Al Sharptonsays Martin’s death revived civil rights activism. “The demonstrations, the rallies that many of us came and started led into what later happened two years later around Ferguson (Mo.), around Eric Garner; but it started, the seeds of that started in Trayvon Martin,” Rev. Sharpton told the Daytona Beach News-Journal. “So Trayvon Martin energized a renewal of civil rights activism in the 21st century like Emmett Till energized it in the 20th century.”